6 Urgent Signs your SME Immediately Needs a CRM

There are 6 signs that your SME needs a CRM that are so urgent you can’t overlook them. If you recognize these signs early enough, you’ll save hundreds of hours of data entry headaches, and remain competitive.

Without further ado here are the 6 Urgent Signs your SME Immediately needs a CRM:

You’re losing data.

A recent study from Experian Data Quality, found that 60% of business say incomplete or missing data is the most common data problem they face. If you find it hard to get an overview of your customers, or that the quality of data you have is poor, you need a CRM. A CRM allows the whole team to keep an overview of all customer interactions. For example, if your sales team has some important information about a customer they can update it in the CRM, keeping customer contacts fresh, and the chances of customer information being lost drop to almost zero. Your Marketing team can then see this updated information and send this customer emails or offers tailored to where they are in the sales funnel.

You have more than one person working in the database.

If you’ve got more than one person working on your spreadsheets, things get messy fast. One person has special color code for one thing, the other one likes to put their prospects in a different spreadsheet from their leads. Things only get messier if you’ve got more than one person working in more than one database. A report released by Experian Quality Datafound that 39% of business have more than 50 databases with contact data. What a disaster! A CRM can centralize all of this data, and you can further sort your customers using tagging features or by segmenting them. There is no need to have customer information spread across different databases or spreadsheets.

Making reports is time-consuming and often inaccurate.

You know that if you want to get things done in your business you have to be able to accurately track progress to see if you’re hitting your targets. But if you find that making reports from your spreadsheet data is painful, time-consuming and often inaccurate, you’d probably be better off with a CRM, which, with a few keystrokes, can produce accurate reports.

You can’t stay in touch with on the go teams.

According to Experian Data Quality, 76% of businesses believe that poor data is undermining their strategy. If you’ve got a sales team on the road, and their idea of a good system is scribbling customer info on a piece of paper, then spending hours inputting that data into a spreadsheet, you’re looking at hundreds of hours wasted on data entry, and you’re running the very real risk of incorrect data being put into the system. If this scenario seems familiar, you need a CRM. Your sales team tap customer data into their Google Contacts on their smartphones. You can then sync this data from Google Contacts into your CRM in real time, and bi-directionally using PieSync! With a system like this, everyone will always have accurate, up to date customer information in real time.

Every customer gets the same treatment.

You know what the sales funnel is, but you’re finding it hard to implement it. You treat customers who just discovered you the same as you would customers who have been with you for years. When you think about it, it makes sense to communicate with the customer based on where they are in their buyer’s journey. Peter Lavers, Managing Director of WCL Customer Management told PieSync:
“It’s counter-intuitive to send a customer, who has just purchased the latest model of your product, a discount on a different model. It signals to them that you don’t care about their decisions and - worse- you look aggressive. For customers who have just made a purchase, you want to reinforce their decision and thank them.”
A good CRM allows you to segment customers depending on where they are in the sales funnel, so you can then send them tailored content and offers that suit their needs depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Your sales and marketing teams hate each other.

If your sales and marketing teams are at each other’s throats - it’s time to get transparency in your sales and marketing pipeline, and a CRM can help with this. You can integrate your marketing tool and social media platforms with the CRM that sales are using. This will allow marketing and sales to share important information, and initiatives they are working on. For instance, sales can see the email marketing campaigns that marketing are sending out and marketing can see if the same campaign is translating into sales. It will increase their efficiency because they know what works! As a bonus, you’ll get these quarreling siblings working together, and see an increase of mutual trust. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll be holding hands around the campfire and singing kumbaya. Stranger things have happened…